


into your eyes where the moonlight swims

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Fantasy, Howl's Moving Castle AU, M/M, Waiting, fragment of a larger plot i guess, snafu as teenage howl, star swallowing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25647337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: Bare feet flexing against the dusty flagstones, still half-warm from the heat of the day, Merriell watches in silent, frozen awe as a star arcs down from the great dark belly of the sky. Its body burns white-blue, hotter than anything this world knows. When it hits the water, Merriell shivers from head to toe.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	into your eyes where the moonlight swims

**Author's Note:**

> so this is my fill for the 'ghibli au' prompt for sledgefu week! honestly, you may need to have seen the film before reading this: it follows the events that sophie sees when she goes into the past, and then back into the present to find howl. i've always been obsessed with this part of the movie, and how it would feel to have no heart but still yearn for love, and always wondered what it must feel like! so this is snafu-howl's POV :~)

Merriell wakes in darkness. 

For the span of a heartbeat, he lies there, wondering what had woken him. The cottage is dim, and still; like the world is holding its breath. The dark shapes of furniture, the vague moonlight streaming through the windows to pool on the stone floor. Slowly, the dried flowers above his mantel turn in some invisible draft. Merriell doesn’t move a muscle. There’s the smell of ozone on the air. 

Then, a noise like wind chimes. The cottage is lit from outside, the glow flaring and fading as quickly as it had come, and then again, and again. Merriell bolts up in bed, the light sweeping over his sheets and the cluttered room, shining dully in the trinkets and devices on his desk. The colour of magic. His heart is hammering like a tiny drum in his chest. 

It’s time.

Merriell is flinging himself out of bed and to the door before his half-asleep brain can register it. Outside, the light is brighter, that sharp smell of ozone thicker. Bare feet flexing against the dusty flagstones, still half-warm from the heat of the day, Merriell watches in silent, frozen awe as a star arcs down from the great dark belly of the sky. Its body burns white-blue, hotter than anything this world knows. When it hits the water, Merriell shivers from head to toe.

He’s dreamed of this since he’d found the book in Suliman’s study. Dusty, huge, heavy with secrets. The binding so old and worn that pages had slipped from it when Merriell had opened it up to look. Tales of falling stars and fearsome wizards, warnings of demons crawling under your skin and burning you up from the inside out. It wasn’t a fairytale, but Merriell had been so gripped by it that it may as well have been. He’d stolen it. Suliman had let him. After all, nothing goes on in the world without her knowing. 

Now, Merriell leaves it behind. Sat open on his desk amongst pages of notes, half-conjured summoning circles, sigil after sigil that never worked. The meadows call to him, cloaked in the night and so endlessly vast that Merriell is sure he’d fall off the end of the world if he tried to cross them. The ground is soft between his bare toes as he steps away from the cottage, sleep still gritty at the corners of his eyes, but mind sharp as he watches another star fall to its death. 

They’re coming fast, now. Skittering across the black water in bursts of prismatic light. The whole spectrum of colour and beyond — extinguished in an instant. Merriell’s hair feels stiff with electricity, can feel it in his fillings, in his earrings, in his fingernails. He’s directionless, sloughing through the tall grass, eyes on the skies and heart lodged up eager in his throat.

Is it dangerous, to see something so beautiful, so young? What if nothing in his life ever matches up to this? The last fleeting moments of a star’s life. Tears are rolling fat and hot down his cheeks; Merriell can taste them in his mouth when he swallows. 

Suliman calls him lazy. She says he’s got no work ethic, no knack for magic, but Merriell knows better. If there’s easier ways to do things, why not take advantage? That’s not laziness, that’s ingenuity. All the greats cut a few corners. 

The stars dance across the dark water on all sides as Merriell strides further into the meadows. Mud clings to his feet, to his bare calves, cool and sucking as though trying to keep him from what he wants. The air is choked with the perfume of the blooming wildflowers, with the stink of the dying stars. Ozone, the air the first men breathed. Merriell takes a lungful of it in, and grins to himself. The grasses whisper in the strange silence. 

The star comes to him, rather than he to it. 

Screaming down out of the sky as though summoned. Beyond blue, beyond any colour the human eye can see, filling Merriell’s world as he tilts his head back to watch its descent. He wonders if it’s scared. He wonders if it can see him; if it knows the deal he wants to make. 

His hands come up of their own accord, and Merriell braces himself for a harsh impact that never comes. The dying star sinks into the cage of his palms like it’s always been there. A tiny, hot, shivering thing. Merriell can taste the magic, now. Like touching your tongue to a battery. The thing trapped between his hands shifts. Slowly, Merriell brings his cupped hands to his face, and opens them.

“Does it hurt?” he murmurs. The star roils between his palms, shapeless and shifting and pressing against the cracks between his fingers. Merriell clutches them together more tightly. “Do you want to make a deal?” he asks, and the star goes still. 

It looks like nothing. It looks like everything. Merriell can’t look at it long enough for his brain to understand what the eyes are seeing. It’s so hot that the rings on his fingers are heating and softening, glowing red against his skin. Somehow, he feels nothing.

_What kind of deal?_

The words whisper into his head, and Merriell grins into his cupped palms at the curiosity in the voice. “Be mine,” he breathes. The stars continue to plummet around them. “I’ll save you from death, and you can be mine.”

_Nothing in life is free_ , it speaks. 

Merriell frowns, clutching his hands tighter. “But I can give you life.”

Silence. Just the noise of the grasses moving with the night wind, the faint noises of the stars hitting the surface of the lake. Merriell’s chest feels tight. The star surges forward in his hands, and now Merriell can see a ghoulish, open mouth, black melting holes of eyes. He fights the urge to recoil as it presses its face to opening between his hands. _Your heart_ , it whispers, greedily. _Let me have your heart._

As if in answer, it leaps in Merriell’s chest. “My heart?” he stutters, balking for the very first time. The book he had stolen had warned him of an exchange needing to be met, but that was why Merriell had planned to catch a falling star. He’d deemed saving it from a black-watered death to be enough. Apparently, it was not. “But I need it,” he says, feeling it thump vital in his throat, in his teeth.

_Handsome, sneaky boy who will make a handsome, powerful man,_ the star purrs. _What do you need a heart for?_

Merriell swallows thickly. The star’s light is ebbing, dying; his hands no longer glowing as they had been. The wind has brought a chill with it now. Merriell, barefoot, wearing only his nightclothes, shivers. When he unfurls his hands to bring the star to his mouth, the molten metal that was once silver rings slides like quicksilver through the creases of his palms. 

Star eater. Merriell thinks of the illustrations in the book, of the etchings of men on their knees, burned up from the inside out. Will it kill him? Will it hurt so bad he’ll wish he was dead? There’s no time to consider it. That stink of ozone is all around him, inside of him — curling through his sinuses until his eyes water, into his lungs to make him gasp for air. He can feel the star in his chest like a hot coin, a hot stone, bigger and bigger until he’s doubled over and clawing at his thin nightshirt.. _Mistake,_ he thinks. _Mistake, mistake, mistake —_

His chest glows. Merriell presses his hands to his sternum, feeling the unnatural heat of the demon in him, travelling up the way it came until he’s choking, gasping on the fragrant night air with his fingertips making furrows in the soft, wet peat he’s slumped to his knees on. 

Will he die? Is he dying? Is this how the stars feel, as the ground comes closer and closer? 

He spits up his heart, and the night rings with the silence that follows. 

Nothing moves but the stars on their inexorable descent into nothingness. The grass doesn’t whisper, the flowers don’t sway. Then slowly, slowly, Merriell uncurls from the knot he had made around his chest, eyes going to his open palms where his heart burns. 

It’s small. Smaller than you’d think a heart would be. Distantly, Merriell aches for it, even as the blue flames lick up and over it until he’s holding the demon — his heart no more. The muscles in his chest clutch around nothing. Merriell feels empty, deadened, watching with heavy eyes as the demon’s black mouth opens, and it laughs.

“Delicious!” it cries. “So tender, so hopeful —” A blue-flamed tongue leers from its mouth. 

Merriell wobbles when he stands again, knees dirtied from the ground, centre of balance thrown off in some small but significant way. “It hurt,” he croaks, accusatory, and shifts the demon to one palm as he raises the other to wipe tears from his eyes. “You didn’t tell me it’d hurt.”

“Everything hurts,” it says, fiery tongue lapping at the melted metal still pooled in Merriell’s palms. “At least you’ll never know the pain of a broken heart — ha!” It’s laughter carries out over the midnight meadows. 

Merriell settles his hand over his breastbone, disturbed by the lack of life within. Distantly — so distantly he brushes it off as his mind — he hears a voice. 

_”Find me in the future!”_

But when he looks, the world is as serene and still as it had been when he’d woken. The cottage in the distance, the lazy turn and creak of the waterwheel. The star cull has ended. “Did you hear that?” he asks the new demon, eyes transfixed on empty air.

———

It’s a complicated feeling, having your thoughts run down to nothingness. 

Merriell knows nothing but silence, but the shift of his feathers, the ache in his bones from being so still, for so long. His empty chest. His empty, beast-like mind. Calcifer always told him it would come to this; a surrender of his human side to the part of him they both knew to be the true one. Power always comes at a cost. His hands have been claws for years. Only Eugene had been able to keep the beast from the threshold, to soothe the feathers back down into his skin.

_— Eugene_. Deep in the depths of midnight feathers, something stirs. Something like a heart, but not quite. From the murk, the beast-brain remembers a voice. Remembers starlight hair, the curve of warm brown eyes. 

A mistake made in childhood, echoing out through the years. Like a string pulled taut, and pulled on. The reverberations shuddering bone deep. Merriell doesn’t know how long he’s waited. He doesn’t know himself, doesn’t know his name, doesn’t know where he’s come from or where he’s going. He knows only one thing, and that’s to wait.

And so, he waits.

Sometime in the near distant future, a pair of familiar hands will part the feathers grown over Merriell’s face, sending his pupils shrinking back at the sudden daylight on his face. His mind retreated so far back into the beast, he won’t be able to make a sound. Won’t be able to even let show on his face how the sight of Eugene makes his stomach jump. His face unlined and sweet, open, tears clumping his lashes into pale, wet spikes. Looking at Merriell like he’s — Merriell, and not the overgrown monster he just can’t turn his shoulder to.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Eugene murmurs, and those hands are familiar and unfamiliar all once. No longer age-spotted, no longer thin-skinned and wrinkled. They touch Merriell’s still face. “Look at you.”

_Don’t,_ Merriell wants to say, but the beast has a fist around his vocal cords. He’s frozen, trapped, beating his fists against a body too big and unmoving to care. The feathers hurt, when they grow from his skin. They hurt when they retract. What had Calcifer said, all those years ago? _Everything hurts_ , his fire-tongue chasing molten silver on Merriell’s palms. It’s been so long since he’s had a heart that Merriell doesn’t know what he’d do with it. Would be love? Would he hate? Would it be worth it?

_You have to find someone who makes you want a heart more than you want power_ , his mind offers him. 

Then Eugene kisses him, warm lips to Merriell’s immobile face. Somewhere beneath the mass of feathers, Merriell’s hollow chest squeezes around nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
